Conventional search applications provide a citation list of documents in response to a search query. For example, a user can consider the documents based on their citation (e.g., data identifying a court opinion), and select one the citations in order to view the corresponding document. In addition to the citation, the list may also include a “signal” with each citation. The signal may represent, for example, a treatment of a legal document in the legal community, such as an indication of the treatment of a court's decision. For example, for an appellate level court decision, a red signal that is located next to a case's citation in the list may indicate that the court's decision has been subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court. This signal would thus alert the user that the listed case should not be used by an attorney to characterize precedent in, for example, a legal opinion or brief.
Although a signal provides a snap shot view of the treatment of a court decision, the signal may not supply enough information to accurately determine whether the decision is law that should not be cited. For example, the Supreme Court may have only overturned the decision on one particular issue, while later cases could have relied upon other issues in the listed case as precedent. Indeed, treatment of cases are often more complex and nuanced than indicated by the case signal. Indeed, documents, such as cases and other legal documents, are often treated in multiple instances and in varying manners.
While it would be advantageous for a user to evaluate the entire treatment of the listed document, it is not always practical to do when quickly scanning through query results. Moreover, even if the entire treatment information is readily available, an examination of such information would be burdensome when evaluating a list of citations.